


Lie

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Wonderland (comic)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-19
Updated: 2008-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:53:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1632554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Story by JSG</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lie

**Author's Note:**

> Written for cherry vanilla

 

 

Her name was Calie Liddel. Or was it Lacy Tenniel now?

Her mind wasn't quite what it used to be since she had moved to New York. Or, more precisely, ran away to New York. A concrete jungle meant for her to become lost in it's tangling streets and towering buildings, it's sea of inhabitants all as different and strange as the denizens of Wonderland itself. Often she would look in the mirror and wonder to herself if that had really happened, if she'd really gone through the rabbit hole and lived out that nightmare. And sometimes she wondered if her life before then were the dream and if she'd woken up to something cold and harsh, a motherless, fatherless world where she was alone with a man she wasn't sure she loved, carrying his child.

It was all a bit much for anyone, let alone a teenaged girl working in a diner. Meeting the gaze of her own reflection, Calie (or Lacy, depending on who you asked) could only manage a kind of apathy with herself. The blonde roots of the hair she'd stopped dying showed through the artificial blackness of the rest, standing out like a beam of sunlight piercing the night. She couldn't see the point in continuing to keep that habit up, or perhaps she just saw the point in letting it show naturally, in looking different for her new, different life.

She was living a lie now, the lie of Lacy Tenniel, and no comforts, large or small, could make her happy. That horrible place, that Wonderland, it had ruined her mother and now it was tightening it's icy grip around her, never leaving her thoughts, never leaving her dreams, thrusting her mind into horrors unimaginable as she slept. People thought the girl was crazy, they way she was scared of things like harmless little cats, the way that her blue eyes would shift around uneasily when she was around a spread of food, memories of the time she was drugged and stripped naked by the Mad Hatter, meant to be his own sick feast in her last moments of agony flooded her thoughts, pushing their way forward in her mind any time something triggered the slightest memory of that day.

In her old life, when she was still Calie and had friends and a home and a family, she would get away from her problems with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Mostly drugs. She'd tried to do that since, and the hallucinations and experiences they brought her were worse than the dreams. The world around her melting, twisting into the hellish visage of that land of madness and death. Blood and insanity covered everything in her substance-induced visions and she would find herself crying in the fetal position as her worst nightmares, the ones she'd experienced in the waking world, would come back to haunt her and slaughter her from the inside out, stabbing and pulling at her mind until reached the breaking point. Drugs were no longer the answer.

There was another way out that the skinny girl from a small town toyed with, and her lips, no longer artificially painted with black or purple or a color in-between, could not form a smile when she entertained the notion. Death's unsympathetic embrace, the long, quiet sleep of eternity. Calie could never quite place what stopped her from doing it every time. She would always think "Am I just like my mother?" when she fingered the razorblade, turning it in her hand and watching the light reflect off of it's smooth steel surface in different ways. Flashbacks of finding her seven-year-old self finding her mother bleeding from the wrists in the bathtub assaulted her senses. Sometimes she thought of the child growing inside of her, and resolved to stay strong for it's sake. And somewhere in the back of her mind, the thought she wouldn't let become clear would be the decisive factor. What if it really was an eternal sleep? A dream she would never be able to wake up from? There would never be an escape. She would look at that sharp, silver piece of cold comfort and put it down until it was time to do it all over again the next morning.

She would see Brandon, her boyfriend and the father of her unborn child, on the way out to work. He thought she was crazy with her tales of gigantic monsters, rhyming butchers of human flesh, ferocious-looking caterpillars that spoke in existentialism and riddle, often joking that he wished he were there when she did those particular mushrooms. But it wasn't until she told him about the real, or at least real to him, parts of it all, the way her grandfather said she was supposed to be a sacrifice to madness and chaos, that he truly got obnoxious and hard to talk to, always telling her to see a shrink or get some help. Calie had a hard time saying she loved him now, but she went through the motions of saying it and kissing him goodbye anyway, a vain attempt and keeping some false sense of a normal life.

Her best form of respite was a girl she'd met at her job in the diner, Melody was her name, who, with her take-no-shit attitude, purple hair, and generally dark wardrobe reminded Calie of herself not even a year ago. She took a bit of comfort in being around Melody, she would listen - not about Wonderland, and not about her "distant" past, she couldn't talk about that, not in her role as Lacy Tenniel, but about her feelings, isolation and despair, and at least get someone who would let her sit and cry and talk and spill as much as she could without wanting to refer her to the nearing psychiatrist. Melody almost felt like a guardian angel that could protect her from the insanity that she had become accustomed to living in, and she felt guilty that the woman would never truly know her outside of the elaborate lie she had become.

An elaborate lie. When thought of that way, it made her want to go back home to the bathroom and finally let blade meet wrist and embrace the flowing crimson of her end. And those thoughts were a lie, too, because she could never act on them, never do anything but say she would and then never go through with it.

Wonderland had stolen her mother's mind away from her, leaving her a shell of a woman without a true life, and now it had her completely. Now it was working on Calie, it had already taken her life, her family, and it was working on her sanity. Every day the walls of madness and horror grew ever closer and she could feel her little island of respite in her mind growing ever smaller. Time did not heal the memories, it made them seem stronger against the forgotten ones of her everyday life. Wonderland had taken Calie Liddel and in her place left Lacy Tenniel, the living lie. She wondered how long until it had her completely, too.

 


End file.
